By the end of the day, they made it to Leroy's safe house outside Flagstaff. Charlotte didn't quite know what she was expecting, but this wasn't it. The property had a lot of empty acres of land, tucked out away from the highway and other residential areas. The yellow paint was a little faded, but the white trim on the eaves and the wraparound porch looked almost new. Charlotte took Leroy's key and opened the house. Though it was musty and far too hot, the inside was clean. Charlotte opened the downstairs windows, and the fresh air flowing through the house helped clear out the smell before she shut them up again and turned on the ancient-looking air conditioner, praying that it would work. She grabbed her bags and headed to the stairs. Through the window she could see that Leroy was still hovering outside by the car, holding his suitcase in his hand, but not moving.
"Does it matter which bedroom I take?" She called out to him.
"Take any of them. Doesn't matter to me."
She picked one of the bedrooms at random and began unpacking her few clothes into the old mirror-topped dresser. The mirror was gilded and a bit gaudy and the drawer pulls were crystal. The bed was an old turn-of-the-century iron post bed, the white paint chipping. But the bright, multi-colored tie-dyed comforter looked like it was from the sixties. The floral curtains in the window looked to be from some decade in between.
Having unpacked, she decided to go downstairs because the air conditioning hadn't done anything to cool the stifling top floor yet. On her way, she passed Leroy unpacking his things in another sparse bedroom with mismatched furniture. His hunched shoulders worried her—he seemed unhappy even though it had been his idea to come here. She wondered if it was just the weather.
The couch in the living room and matching armchair were a bright orange velvet that was so ugly she figured it could only be from the seventies. The early-2000s television was set up in a wooden entertainment set with shelving that included an old-school VCR/DVD player and a sound system with slots for both CD and cassette tapes. In the corner to the left was an old phonograph player with a green conical speaker.
In the back of the room were four bookshelves. One was filled with books, another with movies on VHS and DVD, the third with records on vinyl, and the last shelf was filled with picture frames and trinkets. Charlotte skipped the other shelves and went right for the pictures. Scattered across the shelves were items that seemed random to her. There were a few toys that looked like antiques, a model of an early bi-level airplane, and smaller things like compact mirrors and jewelry. The photos on the shelves were from a bunch of different time periods. There were a few of Leroy with celebrities over several decades including Kevin Bacon, Bon Jovi, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis. In another, he sat on the curb outside the Chinese Theater in LA wearing nineties grunge fashion. There were even old black and white portraits of him in two different soldier uniforms—the exact portrait of a clean-cut young soldier she'd been talking about before.
The photos that most intrigued her were of a dark-haired boy that looked just like Leroy. There were photos of the boy as a baby and as a toddler on a pony. Photos of him and Leroy sitting in a lush backyard, at Christmas, at an airfield where the boy carried one of the model airplanes from the shelves. There was another picture of the boy as a teenager at the same airfield wearing an over-sized bomber jacket and another of him on a dock holding up a large fish.
"Who is he?" Charlotte asked as she heard Leroy's steps creaking the old wooden floorboards as he came downstairs. "Your little brother or something?"
"Or something." He replied, a pained look on his face. "That's Danny. He...he was my son."
"Wow." She said, trying not to sound too nosy. "I cannot picture you as a father. No offense."
He shrugged. "Neither could I. But things happen."
"Well where is he now? Do you have any descendants? We should totally go take a trip to stalk one of them. That'd be so much fun."
He looked out the back window of the house instead of at her as he said, "I don't have any descendants."
"But you had a kid..."
"Who never had any of his own. Sorry to ruin your fun." He turned on his heel and went just out of sight into the kitchen, rummaging around in the cabinets for what she could only imagine was bourbon.
It was then that she noticed there weren't any pictures of Danny any older than a teenager. The oldest he looked in any of them was about twelve or so, standing in front of various landmarks in Washington, D.C. She could have kicked herself. With a mental groan she thought, Oh God, why'd I say that? He's going to hate me.
"Leroy...I'm sorry. I-I didn't know."
"It's fine," he said, appearing out of the kitchen with a new water bottle and cracked it open with an unconvincing shrug. "It was a long time ago, anyway. I'm over it." Charlotte could tell that it was far from fine, but she said nothing. She sank into the ugly orange couch and tried to think of something that might cheer him up.
***
There was so little to do that the next week felt like four. Leroy would shadow travel once a day to get them food—including that Philly cheesesteak Charlotte had been craving—and anything else they needed. Most of the time they sat around watching movies or TV and listened to records on the record player while Leroy played along for something to do. Being on house arrest with nothing to do almost made her miss having schoolwork to do.
Especially since she hadn't had a good night's sleep since they'd gotten to the safe house. She had been good about staying in her own bedroom—the idea of sleeping curled up next to Leroy made her cringe now. It wasn't exactly that he was a Grim Reaper. It was more the fact that he was immortal. He had already lived for over a hundred years before she had even been born. She had thought that he was secretive before she found out he was a supernatural creature. Now she had a hundred years' worth of questions he wouldn't answer.
On the eighth day, they sat in the living room as Charlotte flipped through dissatisfying TV channels, wishing she could come up with a way to make the silence between them less awkward. It had never been awkward between them before. Their friendship had been naturally comfortable—as if they'd known each other forever. Now, she could barely look him in the eye anymore, unsure what to make of him.
When she could come up with nothing better to say, Charlotte asked, "Did you collect a lot of celebrities? 'Grim Reaper to the Stars' or something?"
Leroy turned to look at her, his eyes still bleary over his third cup of coffee. "Why?"
"Well, you showed me Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando. I was wondering if there were any more."
He took another drink of coffee before setting it aside. "Something like that, I guess, but it wasn't intentional. Souls of a kind tend to stick together. It could be a comfort thing, I don't know. But I knew a few actors and artists back in the day and then I started getting called to actors and musicians who'd known them, and so on. And now I've got a large enough well of artist souls that most actors and musicians are sent through me. Like Kurt Cobain. He seemed like a nice enough guy, and I saw him play once. I never met him, but I was the Grim called to him."
"Who else do you have in there?"
He shrugged as the now-familiar black fog started to swirl around him, and when it faded away, James Dean was sitting in the big armchair looking back at her.
"That's so cool!" Charlotte's jaw dropped a little. "Did you ever actually meet him? Or did you just collect him?"
Leroy had an odd, sheepish look on his face even while that sly smile tweaked up the corner of his mouth. "I made out with him in a coat closet at a party once."
"No way! Who else are you hiding in there?" After a few minutes of begging, he showed her more of the big-name celebrities he'd collected. But he soon got bored of the game and settled back into his seat as himself. Not until then did she ask, "Is that where your musical ability comes from?"
An insulted look crossed his face as he shook his head. "I learned to play the piano back before I died, and then in the twenties I taught myself to play the guitar. Practice at something for a century and you'll get pretty good at it—no Grim cheats required."
Still finding nothing she wanted to watch on TV, she got up to look at the large collection of movies in the corner. The shelves were laden with all manner of movies—Oscar winners and Classics whose names she recognized at once. There were also more commercial movies of recent years that she knew, and several older movies on VHS she'd never heard of and didn't really intend to watch. She looked through the section of Oscar-winners, not finding what she was looking for. "Where's Titanic?"
Leroy scoffed. "Don't tell me you actually want to watch that?"
"Of course! It's a classic—it's the most romantic movie of all time."
"I wouldn't know—I've never seen it."
Charlotte blinked in disbelief. "How could you have lived through the '90s and never seen Titanic?"
"Why would I want to watch it? I already know how it ends—spoiler alert: the boat sinks. It's not going to have a happy ending."
"Mister true-love-doesn't-exist only likes happy endings?"
"I also don't believe in fairy godmothers but that doesn't mean I want Cinderella to die at the end. Nobody wants to watch a fairytale with a sad ending—why else would Disney change them all to make them happy?"
She turned back to the rack of movies, determined to find something light-hearted since Leroy seemed so concerned about watching something with a happy ending. Marilyn Monroe's face on the side of a DVD case caught her eye and she pulled How to Marry a Millionaire off the shelf. For as legendary as the icon was, Charlotte had never seen anything she'd been in. "How about this?"
Leroy shrugged like he didn't care, and Charlotte put the movie on. As soon as the starlet appeared on the screen, Charlotte leaned forward, intrigued. After a few minutes, she was about to make a comment about what a stereotypical dumb blonde the character was, when she caught a sidelong glance at Leroy.
He was leaning half off his chair, propping his elbow on his knee as he rested his chin on his hand. He was so enraptured by her performance that he forgot to hide his emotions from her. His face showed nothing but love for the woman on the screen. Though his blue eyes shone with utter admiration, she could see a tear slipping out of the corner of his eye. The sight of it caused Charlotte a pang in her gut that she couldn't decipher. Throughout the movie, Charlotte found herself watching Leroy as often as she did the screen. The mixture of rapture and agony in his expressive eyes intrigued her.
As the movie winded down, he sighed and said, "Wasn't she wonderful?" in a far-off voice that matched his expression. "She would have made a great comedian if she'd lived longer."
"Yeah, but she didn't seem too bright."
He waved his free hand. "That was an act. She gave people what they wanted from her; she was good at that. But she was so smart and when she put her mind to do something...she was incredible." He said all this without turning his head toward Charlotte or taking his eyes off the screen as Marilyn and the other characters sat at the counter of a New York diner.
"You loved her, didn't you?" She asked, her heart sinking.
"Yeah, I did." He seemed to catch himself sharing something he hadn't meant to, and he cleared his throat and stood up as the disc turned back to the main menu.